Marjorie Backman
editor and writer
Seasoned news editor skilled at shaping articles -- online and in print -- for clarity, substance, structure and language.
PROJECTS
The New York Times
Teaching Japanese-American Internment Using Primary Resources
The day after the early-morning surprise assault on Pearl Harbor, on Dec. 7, 1941, the United States formally declared war on Japan and entered World War II. Over the next few months, almost 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, over 60 percent of whom were American citizens, were removed from their homes, businesses and farms on the West Coast and forced to live in internment camps. Why?
The New York Times
New Web Portal Provides Access to Historic Materials on Jewish ...
New Web Portal Provides Access to Historic Material...
The Wall Street Journal
Ben Franklin Gets a Makeover
For the latest word on biographical museums, check out the newly revamped Benjamin Franklin Museum in Philadelphia. If it hasn’t shaken the “great man of history” myth entirely,
The Wall Street Journal
Polish Museum Conjures Jewish Life Before the Holocaust
The Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw opened last month to great fanfare but no exhibitions for visitors to see. That all changed yesterday with the launch of its first temporary exhibiti...
The New York Times
A Nation’s Lost Holocaust History, Now on Display
When Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien, or Jewish Community Vienna, decided to sell a vacant building in the summer of 2000, two employees were sent to look for any archival material that might have been left behind...
The New York Times
Survivors Complain of Delay in Release of Holocaust Files
Even as a huge cache of Holocaust-era files was being presented publicly at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington this week...
TIME
Otto Frank's Hunt for a Visa
About a year before Anne Frank began her diary in June 1942, her father started a writing project of his own. Though most of the world now is familiar with Anne's private musings while her family was in hiding from Nazis, Wednesday's release of the Otto Frank file — whose discovery was first reported by TIME.com in January...
TIME
Otto Frank's Letters Discovered
Two summers ago, Estelle Guzik, a volunteer archivist at New York City's YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, came across a curious file previously not indexed: a cache of letters written by Anne Frank's father, Otto. The roughly 80 documents, including considerable correspondence from Otto Frank to friends, family and officials, reveal just how desperately Mr. Frank...
Unpublished
The Daily: A Lens on Justice
Revamped N.Y. museum opens permanent space for civil rights exhibitions
http://bit.ly/1EkFP4A
TIME
Luxe for Lease
Susan McSweeney, mayor pro tem of Westlake Village, Calif. (median home price: $1 million), likes to carry a stylish handbag. But for her to invest $300 to $400 for a new Cole Haan, she figures she should carry it every day for a year. "I get tired of the same purse," she says. "I like flexibility." Instead she rents from Bag Borrow or Steal ...
TIME
Time: Books of Life
Some bitter and mournful, others folksy, the manuscripts lay abandoned. Who could find them, buried in attics and special libraries? Who could read their Yiddish? And so these Yizkor (or memory) books
BusinessWeek
Google Wants to Index Your DNA, Too
The Web search giant's investment in Navigenics is further proof it wants an early stake in direct-to-consumer genetic screening
Your DNA falls into the realm of "the world's information," and it seem...
The Huffington Post
Photos Tell Harsh Tale of Foreclosure Crisis
Eleven months after Brandie Barbiere stopped paying the mortgage on her Milliken, Colo., home, her husband found out when he returned from work to see their possessions piled on the front lawn. As a sheriff's deputy supervised...
The Huffington Post
Improvements Proposed to Pedestrian Corridor in Midtown
Tourists dawdle along the sidewalks, office workers try to brush by and cars crawl through the streets. Sometimes it seems like Midtown Manhattan has no place to breathe. But what if a magic corridor ...
Transitions Online
A Lost Culture, Found Online
From tending graveyards to creating online shtetls, more non-Jewish Poles are resuscitating their country’s Jewish heritage. For 11 years, Kamila Klauzinska has cared for the Jewish cemetery by her home in Zdunska Wola...